In our article entitled “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update”(PS, January 2007, 133–45), we presented thenames and total citation counts (1960–2005) of political sciencefaculty employed (ca. 2002) in U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions whowere among the 400 most cited in their cohort or subfield. Werecognize the very important nature of our data for individualscholars and the institutions at which they teach, and we apologizeto those colleagues whose citation counts were misreported,especially to those few whose counts were off by a very largeamount. Yet, given that nearly 4,000 political scientists areemployed in a Ph.D.-granting institution in the U.S., and given thenumerous data limitations associated with using the Web of Sciencesearch engine (as we explained in the lengthy methodologicalappendix to our article), while we worked as hard as we could toprevent errors, having some errors in our data set was virtuallyunavoidable.

Professor Judith Hicks Stiehm asked students and political scientiststo consider some things about our military in her introduction(453–6) to the July 2007 PS symposium. Thedeliberations on my end as a student are over. Here are theresults.

This forum is a unique opportunity to bring social science researchto bear on public policy and the practical effects of electionreforms in the American states. It is also an opportunity to studyAmerica's election system, building on the research of some of theleading scholars working in this area. The American states offer anatural laboratory (a “laboratory of democracy”), with significantvariation in the rules, institutions, and procedures governingelections. This forum empirically evaluates what we have learnedabout the effects of various election reforms in the 50 states. Thepapers included in this forum were originally presented at aconference hosted by Kent State University's department of politicalscience and which had a title similar to that of this symposium. Thetheme is now shared by the conference and this symposium: that the2008 presidential election will be crucial for American democracy,especially in light of the apparently related phenomena ofdecreasing (or flattening) voter participation rates, low trust ingovernment and political efficacy, alleged procedural irregularitiesin recent elections, uncompetitive congressional elections oruncontested state legislative elections, and lapses in ethicaljudgment by politicians in the past decade.

Political science has a long tradition of research into topics suchas campaign finance and redistricting, but these separate effortshave only recently merged into something resembling a recognizablesub-field of political reform. One impetus for this new-foundcoherence has been the emergence of recent reform concerns regardingsuch matters as U.S. election administration, primary electionprocedures, conflict of interest situations, ballot restrictions onminor party candidates, and the need for transparency. The additionof the new on top of the still-unresolved, ongoing problems hasyielded plenty of grist for the political science mill.

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxedadministrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast aballot at a time and place other than the precinct on ElectionDay—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically,reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, andreducing barriers between voters and the polls is an importantmethod for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting bymail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirementsshare this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons,drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe thatearly voting reforms should increase turnout, the empiricalliterature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominentstudy suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increasein turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statisticallysignificant—increases in turnout associated with other conveniencevoting methods.This work is supportedby the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/BrookingsElection Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of ReedCollege. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharingdata with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlierversion of this paper. All responsibility for interpretationslay with the authors.

The aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constantlearning in regards to election administration in the United States.Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily onvoting technology and on which voting technologies were best atcapturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting TechnologyProject developed the “residual vote” metric; numerous studies havesince examined residual vote rates across different votingplatforms. Congressional reform of elections—exemplified in the“Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002” (P.L. 107-252)—also focusedlargely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards forvoting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aidin its purchase.Authors are listedalphabetically. The data collection in Cuyahoga County, Ohio wasfunded by the Election Science Institute (ESI) through acontract with the Cuyahoga County Commission. We are grateful toSteven Hertzberg of ESI for his assistance in the datacollection. The Utah poll-worker survey was funded by theInstitute of Public and International Affairs (IPIA) at theUniversity of Utah. Steven Snell of the Center for the Study ofElections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young Universityprovided valuable research assistance for this project.

The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders,public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—mostprominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like NewMexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment(Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faultyequipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballotsled to the loss of as many as six million votes (Caltech/MIT VotingTechnology Project 2001). Confusing ballots, like the butterflyballot in Florida's Dade County, were found to have led voters tovote incorrectly (Wand et al. 2001). While these problems have, nodoubt, existed for a long time, the closeness of the 2000presidential race and the fact that the number of lost votes had thepower to change the election outcome have brought electionadministration questions to the forefront of policy making.Results were first presented at “TheFuture of Election Reform and Ethics in the States,” hosted byKent State University, Department of Political Science,Columbus, Ohio, January 16–17, 2007, and the following paper waspresented at the Midwest Political Science Association's AnnualMeeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–15, 2007. Data werecollected by monies generously provided by the University of NewMexico's Research Allocation Committee. We'd like to thankLuciana Zilberman, Lisa Bryant, Alex Adams, David Magleby, andthe Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at BrighamYoung University for their assistance with this project. Ofcourse, any errors are our own.

In 2000, Arizona and Maine implemented full public funding for statelegislative elections, and Connecticut will do so in 2008.Candidates who opt to accept public funding receive grants that payfor the entire cost of their campaigns. Advocates of these so-calledclean elections argue that the programs reduce quid proquo corruption, increase electoral competitiveness, andopen up the process to candidates who lack access to traditionalfundraising networks (Phelps 2004).Critics respond that the Maine and Arizona public funding programshave achieved nothing, save for imposing unjust burdens oncandidates who refuse to participate (Basham and Zelder 2005).

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been fora century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans islargely the result of Duverger's Law: the tendency of asingle-member district system to produce two-party competition(Duverger 1963). Minor parties ultimatelyfail in a single-member district system because (1) thewinner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish thirdand (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their voteson hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997; Riker 1982).Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on itsmajoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other electionregulations would have little effect on the number of parties.A longer version of this paper waspresented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future ofElection and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot AccessNews for comments and information.

As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennialpolitical ritual of equalizing legislative district population asrevealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatureswill grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with thepolitically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators,party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerabletime, effort, and money on their obsession with district boundaries,political scientists come to mixed conclusions about redistricting'seffect on electoral politics. About the only consensus reached is onthe electoral effects of racial gerrymandering, where debate hasshifted to its normative implications.

Election reforms have attracted substantial attention since thetroubled elections of 2000. Some address problems in theadministration of elections. Others aim to regulate the conduct ofelected officials and lobbyists. A third category affects thestructure by which elections are conducted. It is not clear whetherthe same over-arching problem motivates interest in these reforms.One common theme may be that public confidence in representationsuffers as a result of actual or perceived deficiencies in theconduct of elections and elected officials. The failure to countvotes accurately, the fact that eligible voters find they are unableto vote, the inability of minor parties to access ballots,revelations of scandalous relations between representatives andlobbyists, the power of wealthy donors, the lack of “civility” inpolitical discourse, the uncompetitive nature of many elections, mayall somehow act together to erode public trust, and reduceparticipation and engagement with representative democracy.

Several of us gathered in 2003 at the annual meeting of the AmericanPolitical Science Association to discuss why, in an association withgroups dedicated to Canadian, French, German, Italian, andChurchillian studies (to name but a few), there was no organizedgroup dedicated to the study of politics in Spain and Portugal.

Portugal and Spain have been at the heart of European history andhave played a critical role in European (and world) affairsthroughout the centuries. Yet decades of relative isolation underauthoritarian regimes in the twentieth century left both countriesat the margins of Europe, and they did not take part in the earlystages of the process of European integration in the 1950s–70s.Fortunately, the success of processes of democratic transition inboth countries in the second half of the 1970s paved the way forfull membership in the European Community (EC).I would like to thank the participants in theconference “Towards the Completion of Europe” held at theUniversity of Miami on April 2005, and in particular to Dr.Joaquín Roy for all his advice and support. This is an updatedversion of a paper that I presented at the conference publishedin Royo 2006. I would like to thank Jeffrey Kopstein, Ramón deMiguel, Kalypso Nicolaidis, George Ross, and Francisco Seixas daCosta for their valuable comments during the last roundtable ofthe conference From Isolation to Europe: 15 Years of Spanish andPortuguese Membership in the European Union at the Minda deGunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University,November 2–3, 2001. See also Royo 2003.

Interest in the links between corruption and politics has increasedsignificantly since the early 1990s. Although the public widely seescorruption as a phenomenon that particularly afflicts the developingworld—as reflected in the growing emphasis placed on anti-corruptioninitiatives by such international agencies as the World Bank, IMF,OECD, and Transparency International—the issue is also attractingsignificant attention in established democracies. Politicians, civilsociety activists, and media commentators have expressed concernsabout a host of high-profile scandals contributing to a decline oftrust in the political class, whilst a perceived “culture ofcorruption” in several of the post-communist countries ofeast-central Europe is seen as an obstacle to their full integrationinto the European Union. Indeed, corruption has started to become apowerful policy narrative in many countries, blamed for a host ofshortcomings in democracies and non-democracies alike (Heywood andKrastev 2006).

On June 15, 2007, Spain celebrated 30 years since the 1977 electionsinaugurated the current democratic political system. These were thefirst democratic elections in 40 years—the last were held duringSpain's first experience with mass democracy during the SecondRepublic (1931–1936). This essay explores why and how to incorporatethe Spanish case into syllabi on comparative democratization. Isuggest a few interesting topics to explore and more fully develophow the Spanish case can be used to illustrate explanations ofdemocratization, namely modernization theory and elite pactmaking.

What can undergraduate students of comparative politics learn fromstudying Spain? Clearly, many professors do not see any good reasonsto integrate Spain in introductory courses on comparative politicsor European politics. Spain is often considered as a country on theperiphery of western Europe—geographically, economically, andpolitically—and thus not worth spending time discussing inintroductory courses on comparative politics or even westernEuropean politics. Given the time constraints of short semesters,instructors have to make choices about which topics and countries tocover when choosing European case studies for their syllabus, andoften settle for a mix of the “classic” cases such as the UnitedKingdom, Germany, and France, and “newer” cases, such as newdemocracies in eastern and central Europe. Spain fits neither theestablished, advanced industrialized democracies category nor is itof much obvious interest for studying the latest developments in EUexpansion. Spain re-democratized in the latter half of the 1970s andis currently celebrating 30 years of electoral democracy. Thecountry joined the EU, then the European Communities, in 1986,together with Portugal and Greece. Thus, the newness of Spanishdemocracy and its EU membership has long since passed as a point ofinterest for college instruction, giving way to the new democraciesin central and eastern Europe and the more recent waves of EUexpansion. At the same time, Spanish democracy is too young topresent a classic case of advanced industrialized democracies. Inshort, Spain does not appear to have much inherent appeal forundergraduate comparative politics courses.I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from WendyWhitman in collecting information on textbooks andsyllabi.

Although the study of regional and local politics has been largelyconducted in the context of the United States (Loughlin 2001), in recent decades, researchers havestudied sub-state transformations and multilevel governance inEurope (see, for example, Marks 1993;Bukowski et al. 2003; Weatherill 2005). In this article, I urge professors toincorporate this literature in undergraduate, comparative politicsclassrooms and I suggest how to do so using the case of Spain. Iargue that Spain, and more generally southern Europe, provides anexciting context in which to discuss subnational themes. The articleis structured in four sections. First, I explain the ComparativeEuropean Politics course in which I discuss the Spanish sub-state.The second section demonstrates Spain's comparative appeal bysummarizing its State of Autonomies and situating it within theEuropean context. The third section raises theoretical debates aboutdemocracy, subnational institutions, and the European Union. Thefinal section offers accessible lecture examples for Europeanpolitics courses.

Spain occupies a prominent position in the teaching of comparativepolitics. It is a paradigmatic example of a successful transition toand consolidation of democracy, as well as an intriguing study inconstitutional development, federalism, and a host of other topics.I have found that it is particularly useful when discussingelectoral systems and representation.

A century and a half ago, casting a vote in the United States was anengaging social experience, as voters at the polls talked withfriends, threw down shots of free whiskey, listened to livelyentertainment, and generally had a good time (McGerr 1986). According to Altschuler and Blumin(2000, 75)We are grateful to Pam Lamonaca and Nicole Batdorf, whoplayed a key role in organizing Election Day festivals, andTimothy Ryan and Marcos Luis, who helped in all phases of thisproject. We also thank Dan Winslow, whose ideas about raisingturnout were an impetus for this project, and Dan Bergan andBeth Weinberger, who commented on earlier drafts. The studiesdescribed here were funded by generous grants from theInstitution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, the TuftsSummer Scholars Program, and Working Assets, none of which bearresponsibility for the content of this report.

Social scientists have long been interested in how academicdisciplines are organized (Ben-David and Collins 1966; Kuhn 1970; Lipset 1994; Rojas 2003;Somit and Tanenhaus 1964; 1967). One important element of thisorganization is the network of Ph.D. placements among Ph.D.-grantinginstitutions. Various authors have linked the structure ofplacements to prestige rankings of departments (for sociologydepartments see e.g., Hanneman 2001; andBurris 2004; for political sciencedepartments see Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007c), or have used various features of the structureof academic exchange networks to examine the shaping of disciplinarycareers and practices (Feld, Bisciglia, and Ynalvez 2003; Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007b). There is also a more generalliterature on status and market exchange (see e.g., Podolny 2005).We areindebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographicassistance.